Epilogue #2
She pulls me up by my collar. Kisses me. Deep and warm and tasting like warmth and happiness, and I love this woman with such a staggering, consuming, irrational intensity that the word love feels like calling the ocean a puddle.
"Lie down," she says.
Something in my chest catches fire.
I lie down on the center of the bed. She climbs over me, and the logistics of this are different now than they were in the early months.
She has to adjust. Shift her weight. Find the angle that accommodates the belly and gives her the leverage she needs.
I watch her work it out with that cute crease of determination between her brows.
The same crease from the first morning she rode me, when everything was new and she was learning my body the way I'd already learned hers.
She knows my body now. She knows it the way she knows the layout of this house, instinctively, navigating by feel.
She knows exactly how to unbutton my shirt.
Exactly how to undo my belt. Exactly how to wrap her hand around my cock and stroke once, firm, from root to tip, and watch my eyes roll back and my jaw clench.
"You like that," she says. Not a question.
"You know I like that."
"I like watching you like it."
She strokes again. Slower. Tighter. Her thumb sweeps over the head, spreading the precum in a lazy circle, and my hips lift off the mattress.
"Wren."
"Mm?"
"Fuck me. Now."
She grins. That grin. The one that started appearing around month three of our marriage, when she realized that she has power over me, real power, the kind that no amount of money or muscle or reputation can compete with.
The power of a woman who knows that the most dangerous man in the city will do anything she asks if she asks it with that grin.
She rises up on her knees. Positions herself. And with one hand on my chest and the other bracing the bed, she sinks down onto me.
Her eyes flutter. Her lips part. Her belly brushes against mine as she takes me deeper, and the visual of it, my wife, heavy with my child, her body opening to take me inside her while our daughter grows inches away from where my cock is stretching her, does something to me that goes beyond arousal.
Beyond desire. Beyond any word that exists for what happens when obsession and love and biology converge in a single, devastating moment.
"Fuck," I breathe. My hands find her hips. Her thighs. The curve of her belly. I can't stop touching her. I need to touch all of her at once. "Wren. You feel..." I don't finish. I can't. Language is insufficient.
She lifts her knees an repositions her feet so they are in front of her, then she leans back giving me a glorious view of her cunt swallowing my cock whole.
Then starts to move. Slow, rolling rocks of her hips that drag her along my length with the practiced confidence of a woman who has been riding her husband for eight months and knows exactly what she wants.
She's not the clumsy, experimental girl from that first morning anymore.
She's sure. She's powerful. She takes what she needs.
And what she needs, apparently, is to absolutely destroy me.
Her pace builds. She rocks harder, bracing her hands on my thighs behind her, and the angle changes and I hit deep, deeper than usual, and she gasps and her inner walls clamp down on me and I grip her hips hard enough to leave marks.
"Careful," I manage. "The baby."
"The baby is fine. The doctor said we can--"
"I know what the doctor said. I was there. I asked fourteen questions and she looked at me like I was insane."
"You are insane." She grinds down on me. Hard. A deliberate, rolling grind that drags me against the soft spot inside her and makes her moan out loud. "You're my insane husband who kills people and then eats me out like it's a religious experience."
"It is a religious experience."
"Shut up and let me fuck you."
She rides me.
She rides me with the devastating confidence of a woman who owns the man beneath her and knows it. Her belly bobs with each movement. Her breasts bounce, heavy and full, and I reach up and cup them gently because they're sensitive, and she arches into my hands and moans my name.
The sight of her. The feel of her. My wife, round with my seed, her head thrown back, her dark hair falling down her back, her body clenching around me in rhythmic waves.
I watch her chase her pleasure with the same single-minded determination she brings to everything.
The same stubborn, iron-willed refusal to quit that kept her alive through twenty-three years of neglect and exploitation and a father who sold her to a monster.
She found a different monster. One who worships her.
"I'm close," she whispers. Her rhythm is getting ragged. Her thighs are shaking. "Dominik, I'm--"
"I know." I lick my fingers and reach for the little swollen bud, applying a pressure that matches her rhythm.
She shatters with a cry that I feel in every cell of my body, and her walls grip me so tight I see white, and the orgasm rips through me with a force that bows my spine and empties me inside her in hot, pulsing waves.
We stay like that. Her on my lap, me throbbing inside her, her bump between us. Her forehead pressed against mine. Our breathing tangled together.
I press my mouth to hers.
"I love you," I say out loud for the first time.
"I love you," I say again, because she taught me that saying it more than once is the whole point.
"I love you, Wren Voronova. I love our daughter.
I love this house. I love the cat, even though it shed on my favorite suit and I had to have the whole thing dry-cleaned.
I love the life you built inside the wreckage of mine. "
She kisses me and shifts off my lap with a small wince. I help her settle against the pillows and pull the blanket up to her chin, then lie beside her with my hand on her belly, where my daughter kicks once more and goes still.
The room is quiet. The city hums outside. Somewhere in this house, a cat named Pickle is shedding on something expensive.
I watch my wife fall asleep. Her face relaxes. Her breathing evens out. Her hand finds mine on her belly and holds it there, and even in sleep she holds on.
I don't sleep. Not yet.
I lie in the dark and I think about a man who walked into an auction with a plan to kill and walked out with a woman he'd die for. I think about the click. About the way a city rearranges itself around a river. About the girl with the chin that wouldn't drop.
I think about wrens. Small birds. Plain birds. Birds that build their nests in the cracks of things that other creatures have abandoned.
She built her nest in the cracks of me.
And I will spend the rest of my life making sure that nothing, no storm, no predator, no ghost from a past that tried to break her, ever shakes it loose.